Apple announced today that its iTunes store would finally be reaching the key market of Canada, to go along with its other recent conquests in the U.K.. Meanwhile, debate rages on in my homeland about Bell and Rogers’ attempts to throttle P2P sharing of copyrighted files, while the legality of such sharing remains ambiguous. And Hollywood, who can no longer tolerate Canada even for service work now that the loony is so strong, blames Canadians for up to 50% of feature film internet piracy (the worst offenders are in Montreal, naturally- those libertines!)

In the new economies of internet trade (where the products are nothing if not ephemeral), a tiny market like Canada’s can suddenly make an outsized difference- if what they are doing is not paying for what we know as ‘products’, sharing media, and then sending it all out to the rest of the world. There is a butterfly-wing result- Canadians may be few in number, but they are affluent enough to access the latest technologies as well as positioned to influence their neighbors to the south. Canadian media producers are used to not making money. The government itself may end up helping to drive this effort.

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